


Emergence

by winged-obsessor (canticle)



Series: Skysong [1]
Category: The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, dynamic tags, will change as the story updates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-17 07:41:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9311924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canticle/pseuds/winged-obsessor
Summary: A single encounter is enough to change the course of a life. Though he wouldn't realize for a long, long time, this was Vio's.





	

When Vio is seven years old, he nearly drowns.

It is his birthday; he asks to celebrate it at his favorite lake, the waters still summer-warm, clear blue shallows shading to murky, unseen depths. He loves the thrill he gets, treading water above the surface, seeing the light filter through silt and sediment only to be swallowed up by the depths.

His mother has gone to rent a paddleboat; his father reads on the shore, sparing an upward glance every minute or two. Vio himself has had free reign of this lake since he was nearly half this age, and plays at being a monster of the depths, wallowing in the soft sand of the shallows, biting at the gentle waves that lap at the shore, before twisting end-over-end and heading back into the deeps, his reign of terror not ended, merely postponed.

A surge of fearlessness has him swimming his way out to the buoys that ring the “swimmers only” portion of the lake. There are no motorboats out this late in the season, and the only paddleboats are over at the far shore, perhaps fishing where the water is undisturbed.

He reaches the buoy and slaps it in triumph. It’s rough and grainy under his palm, and slick with algae beneath the waterline. He treads beside it, suffused with quiet, pleased accomplishment.

On a whim, he looks behind himself, towards the shore.

His mother is still out of sight at the paddleboat counter. His father has wandered off, perhaps to join her. The only other swimmers are either younger or far older, all keeping close to the shoreline.

He turns away, and starts stroking out towards the middle of the lake.

He knows he’s almost there when he feels lakeweed curling around his ankles, tickling his bare feet. The motorboats give this area a wide berth; lakeweed fouls up an engine faster than anything short of a rope. That’s why this is his favorite lake; it’s always so peaceful here on this edge, even amid groups of screaming children.

When he ducks his head underwater, he can almost hear the faint thrum of a motor in the distance.

Weird.

Unsettled, he turns back towards the shore. The lakeweed curls a little more energetically around his ankle; he nudges it off with the toes of his other foot and starts paddling.  
Twenty feet away from the main patch, he feels it against his calf.

It’s not unusual for strands to be displaced from the mass, especially this late in the season. He kicks it off.

Ten more feet—another strand. It must be the same one, dragged along behind him, pushed forward with the current. He bubbles a sigh into the water and flips onto his back, reaching down to dislodge the lakeweed and let it float harmlessly downward into the depths.

Instead of lakeweed, he feels something fleshy.

He looks down.

What he sees will haunt him in his dreams for years to come.

An eel-like head, mantled with fan-like fins, covered in bioluminescent scales. A wide, gaping jaw. More teeth than any living creature needs. Dozens of whisker-thin tendrils, stretching out into the gloom around them.

The tendril around his foot yanks him towards that open, gaping jaw; he drops below the surface, dragged into the depths.

The water is cold, so cold down where the sun doesn’t reach, cold enough to burn every inch of bare skin. He wants to scream but knows he can’t, knows he has to conserve as much precious air as he can, but when the tentacle yanks him downwards again he shrieks, the noise trapped amongst bubbles of air, carried up to the surface where no one will hear them.

He’s seven years old; he has never had thoughts of his own mortality, never pondered on the frailty of his little hylian body. The biggest monsters he’s ever known were the ones under his bed and inside his closet, and Papa had banished those years ago. He is seven, and, in the ways of little children everywhere, he thought himself invincible.

But this beast clearly did not get the memo.

Its jaws open.

Even the tongue has speckles and striations of cold blue light, lining a path straight down its endless gullet.

His lungs are screaming. It would be so easy to open his mouth, wide as the beast before him, and swallow the lake, take it deep inside, let it settle into his bones like the beast will do with him.

It reels him in.

Unbidden, his jaw unclenches. His hands fall away from his mouth. He exhales.

The bubbles float upwards, serene, untroubled by the struggle. He wishes, in one bright flash of panicked lucidity, that he could see the sky once more.

Lake water, cold and musty, fills his mouth.

The bubbles hang above him, serene, untroubled by the struggle. He wishes—

The beast grins, all fangs and hunger, and tips its head back.

He tips his head back as well, and imagines the bright silver streak above is the sky.

The bubbles float downward, serene, untroubled—

_What?_

The streak grows bigger in the blink of an eye, air bubbles streaking downward fast enough to swirl the water in their wake. One hisses past Vio’s face in a rush of friction-heated water, slicing through the tentacle at his ankle. Another, larger, floats down from above, encasing his head and shoulders; he spits out his mouthful of water and gasps for breath, the air tangy and strange.

The bioluminescent beast rears back, shrieking—it comes out closer to a high pitched thrum, like the motorboat he heard earlier. It coils and flails in the water, under the barrage of forceful air bubbles puncturing its hide. It turns, tilts as if to flee into the depths, but before it can the silver streak is upon it.

He can’t make out too many details of the fight that follows. Some small part of him is grateful for that. They move too fast for his eyes to catch, silver and blue and black, and shreds of… _things_ keep floating past him.

He is only seven years old; the events that are happening are almost too much for him to fathom, and when the silver beast turns triumphant towards him, eyes as liquid and dark as the water surrounding them, he squints his own shut and prays to whatever will hear him for a quick and painless death.

Something _answers._

Something wordless, rueful and worried and coldly furious, something ancient.

He opens one eye.

The silver streak hovers in front of him, long and sinuous, head almost filling up his field of vision. Its snout, slender, almost delicate, is a bare inch away from the bubble allowing him to breath.

He doesn’t know why, but he reaches out.

He lays a hand on its snout and it reaches _back._ He can feel it in his mind, looking at him. He is so _small_ compared to it, so fragile, vulnerable. His skin is so soft and unprotected.

He feels a sorrow welling up, endless and heavy with the weight of lost ages, and something inside him reaches back, makes him flatten his hand against that long and graceful muzzle.

When it reaches up with a deadly taloned paw and closes it around him, Vio feels no fear.

It brings him to the surface, sets him delicately onto the shore, away from the main crowd of swimmers. Vio’s first gasp of surface air is the sweetest thing he’s ever tasted, and he gasps, fast and deep, body trying to restore what it knows was lost.

In the light of the sun, his rescuer is even more brilliantly silver, its eyes dark and fathomless. It keeps the bulk of its body hidden underwater.

Vio turns to it from where he kneels in the surf. “Thank you,” he says, because his mother had taught him to always be polite.

The silver thing snorts, and Vio can feel its amusement, warm and comforting, like a blanket in his mind. Along the heels of that comes an urgent feeling of _caution,_ of staying in the shallows, both in a literal and not-so-literal sense.

Vio heartily agrees; when he turns, hearing his parents calling his name, and glances back towards the water, it is gone.

Vio stops asking his parents to visit this particular lake, and never again goes in any farther than his shoulders.

As time passes, the terror over the encounter dulls, though a certain wariness regarding dark water remains. It’s pushed back, away, the mind healing itself when presented with something that never should have happened.

But he never truly forgets.

**Author's Note:**

> and heeeeere we go.


End file.
